Has The Gulf Cooperation Council Been The Biggest Loser Of Trump’s Iran Policy?

For the second time, the Trump administration announced its postponing of the October summit with the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) unit next year. The stated agenda for the summit was to reunify the GCC against Iran’s influence in the region. This event is another example of Trump administration’s failure in rallying the GCC countries behind the US policy of sustained pressure on Iran.

It is no secret that Trump’s tough stance on Iran has not only been appealing to some of the GCC states, especially Saudi Arabia, UAE and Bahrain, but it is indeed what they have long wished for, especially after the Iran nuclear agreement and President Obama’s pivot towards normalizing relations with Iran.

For the GCC Saudi bloc, the situation could have not been any better; from the United States’ unilateral withdrawal from the internationally supported “Iran Nuclear Deal” and re-imposing the economic sanctions to revival of Middle East Strategic Alliance also known as “Arab NATO”, the new US Iran policy went well beyond what the GCC ever expected to achieve with Americans. However, what first seemed to be a long-waited dream for some Arab countries is gradually becoming a bitter reality for them.

With longstanding divisions among the state members on Iran, the US Iran policy has only intensified the tensions within the GCC, inducing more powerful states like Saudi Arabia to exert maximum pressure on smaller states to follow their lead on Iran. The ongoing Qatar blockade orchestrated by the Saudis perfectly demonstrates this bullying method to force Doha to comply with their list of 13 demands.

A year on, Qatar has yet not given in to a single demand on the list. Instead, they have boosted their relations with Iran, counting them as a partner against former allies in the region. Since then, the U.S has also proved to be incapable of mediating between the GCC bloc for ending the blockade.

At the end, it is Iran that emerges as the sole victor of this standoff. According to a senior White House official, the Trump administration also believes that “the blockade has pushed the two countries closer together, and therefore, Iran has been the biggest beneficiary of the effort to isolate Qatar.”

Regionally, despite US pressure on Iran, the power dynamics still remain to be in the interests of Iranians. Last week, at the same time that October summit was being postponed, Tehran hosted the third trilateral summit with the Presidents of Iran, Russia, and Turkey to decide the future of Idlib province in Syria.

Idlib is the last stronghold of Syrian opposition groups including extremist terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda affiliate Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad has declared his readiness to retake the control of with the backing of Iran and Russia. According to experts, this could be the last military battle of the disastrous seven-year civil war in Syria.

It is clear that the Syrian conflict is gradually coming to an end and so far the US, the Saudi bloc and Israel have failed to push Iran out of Syria. Moreover, the Tehran summit among the three presidents , sent a strong message that efforts to isolate Iran have utterly failed.

It is still important to note that Iran, by no means, is the victor of Trump’s Iran policy.

While Iranians are showcasing their diplomatic skills to effectively work with other regional actors to resolve the Syrian conflict, the Saudi-led coalition is struggling to take any positive step toward peace in the Yemeni conflict. Indeed, their bullying approach has been the main reason for the failure of recent efforts by the UN for holding a three-day consultation on Yemen’s civil war in Geneva.

The peace talks were aimed at restarting the negotiations between the Saudi-backed Yemeni government and the Houthi forces to end what the UN has described as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”. However, the failure to guarantee safe returns of the Houthi delegation from Geneva to the Sana’a led the Houthis to refuse attending the talks in the first place.

In spite of heavy international criticism of Saudi-led bombing campaign for their high civilian death toll, the Saudis have shown no signs of flexibility but the continuation of the same maximalist approach to address the Yemeni conflict. Therefore, it is expected that this three-year-old civil war becomes even more violent and complicated as the possibility of negotiations is doomed between the two parties.

It is still important to note that Iran, by no means, is the victor of Trump’s Iran policy. In fact, they are currently faced with a series of serious internal economic and political problems some of which is the direct result of to Trump’s pressure and sanctions campaign against the country. But if the policy objectives were to empower the GCC states, weaken Iran, and contain the Iranian regional influence, the truth of the matter is that this policy has completely failed so far with the GCC being the biggest loser of it.

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Younes Zangiabadi is the founding member of The Institute For Peace & Diplomacy (IDP), as well as the Research Director at the Iranian Canadian Congress (ICC). Younes is also a Masters candidate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

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